https://qz.com/1104642/facebooks-regina-dugan-is-quitting-after-just-18-months/

Regina Dugan, head of Facebook’s secretive Building 8 research lab is leaving the company after just 18 months, she said in a post on the platform. She said it was a “difficult decision,” and that she’d be “building and leading” a new, undisclosed endeavor after she leaves in early 2018.

Dugan, who has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology, ran the Advanced Technologies and Projects lab at Google before joining Facebook in April 2016. What seemed to give her particular credibility in the eyes of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, was her time as the head of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which played an important role in breakthroughs such as the development of the GPS, and the internet itself. At Building 8, she oversaw Facebook’s new hardware projects, all of which are still under wraps.